How to Scan Documents to PDF With Your Phone (No App Needed)

How do you scan a document to PDF on an iPhone?

Open Notes or Files, choose Scan Documents, and hold the phone over the page. The scanner captures automatically, corrects the perspective and saves a multi-page PDF. It has been part of iOS since version 11.

• Notes: create a new note, tap the paperclip or camera icon, then Scan Documents.
• Files: open the Browse tab, tap the three-dot menu at the top right, then Scan Documents. The PDF is saved straight into the current folder.
• Hold the phone over the page. With Auto mode on, the scan is captured as soon as the edges are detected. Switch to Manual for pages the scanner struggles to find.
• Drag the corner handles if the crop is wrong, tap Keep Scan, and continue with the next page.
• Tap Save when done. In Notes, open the scan and use Share > Save to Files to get the PDF out.

How do you scan a document to PDF on Android?

Open Google Drive, tap the + button, then Scan. Photograph each page, adjust the crop, pick a filter and tap Save. Drive produces a PDF and stores it in your Drive account.

On some versions the scan button is a camera icon on the Drive home screen. Google's instructions are in Scan documents with Google Drive. Because the PDF is saved to Drive by default, it is stored in the cloud. That is convenient for most paperwork and worth a second thought for ID documents or medical records.

Getting a clean scan

The scanner software is good. Most bad scans come from light and angle.

• Place pages on a dark table. The contrast helps edge detection.
• Daylight from a window beats the flash, which bleaches the middle of glossy paper.
• Keep the phone parallel to the page. Perspective correction fixes the shape of a tilted page but not the blur at its far edge.
• Flatten folds and hold down curling corners with something outside the frame. Text that bends across a crease is hard for OCR to read.
• Use greyscale or black and white for text documents. They read better and produce much smaller files. Keep colour for anything with stamps, highlights or photos.
• Wipe the camera lens. A smear of finger grease lowers contrast across the whole page and is the easiest fault to fix.
• Check the first scan at full zoom before doing the rest of a stack. If the smallest print is readable, the settings are right.
• For a book, scan one page at a time and press the spine flat. Text curving into the gutter is the most common cause of OCR errors.

How do you make a scanned PDF searchable?

Run the scan through OCR. OCR PDF recognises the printed text and adds an invisible text layer aligned with the words on each page, so the file can be searched and copied from while looking exactly the same.

Without that layer a scan is a stack of pictures. You cannot search it, copy a sentence from it, or convert it to Word. Optical character recognition fixes this. The tool on this site uses the open-source Tesseract engine, running in the browser on your own device. Each page is rendered at 250 DPI and read in turn, and nothing is uploaded.

How big should a scanned PDF be?

Aim for 100 to 300 KB per page for text documents. Phone scans are often 1 to 3 MB per page in colour, so a ten-page letter can reach 20 MB, which is above the limit of many upload forms and close to the 25 MB cap on Gmail attachments.

Tidy up before sending

• A page scanned upside down: Rotate PDF fixes it permanently.
• An accidental duplicate or blank page: Remove Pages.
• Pages out of order after scanning a stack: Organize PDF lets you drag them into place.
• Several scans that belong together: Merge PDF combines them.
• A table edge or your thumb in the frame: Crop PDF trims the visible area. Cropping sets the page's crop box and the hidden part stays in the file, so do not use it to hide private details. Use Redact PDF for that.

Name and store scans so you can find them

Give scans descriptive names when you save them, starting with the date, such as 2026-09-14-council-tax-bill.pdf. Sorting by name then also sorts by date. Once scans have a text layer, Spotlight on a Mac and search on Windows can find documents by the words inside them. A folder of scanned paperwork becomes something you can query. Keep originals of anything legal, such as signed contracts and certificates, even after scanning.

Scans of passports, bank statements and tax forms deserve more care than a recipe. Store them in a folder that is not shared, and before emailing one, add a password with Protect PDF, which uses AES-256 encryption. Send the password separately, by text message or a phone call.

When is a dedicated scanner still better?

A dedicated scanner is better for volume and consistency: hundreds of pages, archival scans at a fixed resolution, double-sided stacks, or documents where exact colour matters. A sheet-fed scanner handles 25 or more pages a minute, both sides at once.

Phones are ideal for occasional letters, receipts and forms. They are a poor fit for bound ledgers, fragile photographs and anything that must meet a stated specification, such as “300 DPI greyscale TIFF”. Many libraries and print shops offer scanning to PDF for a small fee, and most office multifunction printers can scan to a USB stick.